helaman ferguson sculpture: Samf's Pentagonal Biprism

Provenance:

one of the set of four commissioned by Forcade; this form was a studied feature of Sam Ferguson's PhD thesis and Part V of Tom Hales' successful program for solving the Kepler sphere packing problem.

Exhibitions:

2004 AMS/MAA Joint Meetings, Phoenix, Arizona

Availability:

eight weeks

Price:

$2225 (USD)

Dimensions:

5" x 7" x 5"

Date:

2002

Material:

silicon bronze, burnished antique verde patina

Special Engraving:

√(128/27);

Weight:

2 lbs

Commissioned by:

Pressor Rodney Warring Forcade

2003

The Fibonacci numbers are ubiquitious in nature and mathematics. So, it would appear, are tetrahedrons in general position. Professor Forcade invited me to think about tetrahedron in general position, so I thought since general position usually means unequal straight edges I would generalize even more and curve the edges and faces and curl the corners with rotations related to something interesting. In a problem published 800 years ago, Leonardo of Pisa, a.k.a. Fibonacci formulated his famous rabbit problem: beginning with a newborn fertile pair of rabbits, how many pairs will accumulate monthly if each pair produces another pair from their second month on? The solution of this leads to a recursively defined sequence of integers, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … . This sequence has the property that two consequtive terms added give the next term.

Photo credit is Sunforge Studios